No rhyme or reason to what you fancy

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Distraught, dismayed, disappointed: that was my reaction to the recent poll in Blender magazine naming the Fifty Worst Songs Ever, because in that list I spotted quite a few songs that I actually really like - in fact, I spotted approximately FIFTY SONGS THAT I REALLY LIKE.

That's right; I liked just about everything on the list - I liked Simon and Garfunkel's The Sounds of Silence, which came in at number 42, and I liked REM's Shiny Happy People, which came in at number 25, and I even liked Jefferson Starship's We Built This City (On Rock'n'Roll), which came in at number one, and happens to be the song I lost my virginity to back in 1985, with a blonde backpacker from New Zealand called Lara Dumphy, so it will always have a romantic resonance for me, even though the whole thing was pretty much over by the end of the first chorus.

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So no, I wasn't happy at all with that Worst Songs Ever poll, which is why I decided to conduct my very own poll, just among myself, and I think I've come up with a much more objective and thoughtful selection.

First on the list is a song that must surely rank as one of the most rank ever - I'm talking about the birthday party tune that goes "Why was she born so beautiful?/Why was she born at all?/Because she had no say in it/ No say in it at all". WHAT IS THIS SONG ABOUT? I've heard it sung at countless birthday parties over the years and I've never had any idea if it's meant to be a nice song or a nasty song - it starts off by saying that the birthday girl is beautiful, so that's positive, but then it instantly undercuts the niceness by suggesting that maybe she should've been aborted during the first trimester.

And then, in the next line, it's like everyone starts feeling guilt for the previous abortion remark, so they try and make amends by implying that this girl's tragic existence is not her fault, but the fault of her parents, which at least brings the song to some kind of psychological resolution, but it features one of the most appalling rhymes in the history of lyric-writing, where the words "at all" are matched up with the words "at all". I haven't heard a worse rhyme since Year 8 English, when my friend Bernard decided to write a little poem containing the word "orange" and the word "door-hinge". And another song on my Worst Songs Ever list would have to be Marvin Gaye's I Heard It Through the Grapevine - but ONLY the version used in the Kellogg's Sultana Bran ad where the mum and her kids dance around the kitchen, singing "Sultanas from the grapevine/ Make Sultana Bran taste so fine".

I don't know why, but I hate that song, and I hate the mother, and I hate the kids, and I hate their kitchen - every time I see that ad, I suddenly DON'T need a bowl of Sultana Bran to provide the necessary fibre to stimulate bowel activity.

Other songs on my list include the Fremantle Dockers' Song, the theme from The Nanny, the Canadian national anthem ("O Canada/Our home and nativeland/True patriot love in all thy sons command"), but without any doubt, the NUMBER ONE WORST SONG EVER would have to be a song that few people have actually heard, and that's because I wrote it myself: in fact, only my mother has heard this song and, after she heard it, she cancelled all my guitar lessons.

I wrote it back in the summer of 1977 for a girl I had a huge crush on, and for some reason, I wrote it in a Scottish folky style, loosely based on Paul McCartney's Mull of Kintyre, but only in rhythm and chords and all the notes. The chorus went like this: "I can hear the sound of bells/Ringing through the cobbled wells/And at night the shire hall is shining bright/ Where the folk will dance all night/I'd like to take my chance and dance with you", following which I yelled out "LET'S DANCE", and there was a very long instrumental bit that I wasn't good enough to play, so I had to hum it instead, and it went "La laaa la-la-la-laaaaaa" over and over again until the song was finished. The worst song ever. That, and every single Number One hit on the pop charts for the past 10 years.